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573 total votes.

For almost 30 years, Larry Rosen has been studying the impact of technology on people. He knows what he’s talking about. And who he’s talking about.

Himself.

The Solana Beach professor’s new book, “iDisorder,” is about how our obsession with cell phones, computers and social media threatens to consume us — how the need to be connected all the time leaves many teetering on the edge of serious psychiatric problems: narcissism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, voyeurism, attention-deficit disorder, depression.

He’s not scolding. He’s looking in the mirror.

He’s a guy who once walked into a pole while he was texting. He catches himself using “I” and “me” too much on Facebook. When his phone beeps, indicating the arrival of new email, he almost salivates in anticipation.

“I read myself in everything I wrote,” said Rosen, a psychology professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills and the father of four grown children.

But he also knows how to step away from the brink, and he’s on a campaign to help others, too, regularly making presentations around the world (India two months ago, Australia in June). It’s why he wrote the new book, which is part diagnostic manual, part self-help guide.

He got the idea for “iDisorder” by going to the movies. A self-described film junkie, he noticed a change in audience behavior. It used to be everybody turned their phones off before the movie started, or turned them to silent mode and put them away.

Now, he said, some just can’t do without. They’re addicted. He sees them ducking down, trying to shield the telltale light while they read or write a text. And as soon as the movie is finished, almost everybody immediately reaches for their phones.

He sees the same thing in restaurants, folks “eating fish with a side of smartphone.” He sees people constantly patting their pockets, suffering from “phantom vibration syndrome,” the feeling that a phone is buzzing even when it isn’t.

So he had a question: “What is going on here?”

Computer junkie

Rosen, 62, grew up in the San Fernando Valley. He remembers his parents — mom a high school math teacher, dad an accountant — taking him to UCLA open houses, where he would go to the computer lab and watch sprocket-printers spew out images of Mickey Mouse.

“I was always a geek,” he said.

He went to UCLA and studied math, shifting to psychology for graduate school at UC San Diego. When he started at Dominguez Hills in the early 1980s, he brought computers into his classrooms. The students freaked.

“They didn’t like it, they were scared.” So Rosen studied “computerphobia,” the fear people had of these newfangled things.

Now the newfangled things are causing other problems, and that’s what Rosen and two longtime collaborators, Nancy Cheever and Mark Carrier, research. They’re part of a growing group of scholars nationwide studying tech saturation and its effect on brain rewiring, sleep, relationships, and mental health.

“People aren’t stressed any more from being scared of computers and other devices, they’re stressed from too much of them,” Rosen said. “For some, it really does become too much of a good thing.”

And he does think they are good things. He has an iPhone, an iPad, a MacBook. He likes computers so much he saves the parts from old machines, using them to decorate wall sculptures he makes out of rock’n’roll records and clocks.

“I’m pro-technology,” he said. “I think they are amazingly powerful tools. But I think some of us have forgotten that they are tools. A tool is something you pick up when you need it. It shouldn’t be a part of you, an appendage.”

During his lectures, he lets students bring and use whatever devices they want, except for talking on the phone. He also tells them they need to be in charge of their technology, and not vice versa.

In the book, he shares the story of a student who drove to campus, then turned around — missing a class — because she’d forgotten her phone.

“They have to make the right decisions,” he said. “Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. The ones who don’t, don’t do well.”

A Pavlovian reaction

He thinks the next five years will be a period of transition. More and more of us will be connected 24/7. We’ll have our phones out all the time. We’ll sleep next to them and check them as soon as we wake up — and even wake up just to check them.

Almost everybody will have smartphones, which will make it easier to do more things electronically instead of face to face, he said. “I think that will both open our worlds and close them in some ways.”

Open them because seemingly every day brings a new “must-have” app or website, a different way to be plugged in. And close them because people get sucked into their devices at the expense of face-to-face interaction.

“It’s going to start fracturing relationships more easily,” he said.

Then he thinks people will start feeling overwhelmed and overcommitted “and they won’t like it.” They’ll pull back from some of their technology, maybe not feel like they have to post on Facebook 10 times a day. Maybe not Twitter every tidbit.

“They’ll ask if they really need to be this connected,” he said. “They’ll start jettisoning the things that don’t....”

He stopped. “My phone just beeped and I actually felt like I salivated. Who just sent me an email? In 15 minutes, it will beep again, and I know I’ll be anticipating it. It’s very Pavlovian. And, actually, scary.”